Aching, In the Quiet of His Heart
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: HPDM pre-slash. Harry has finally found Draco. The chase has been long. And now he stands before the house and uses a spell to understand the man who has eluded him for so long. COMPLETE.


**Title:** Aching, in the Quiet of His Heart

 **Disclaimer:** J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

 **Pairing:** Harry/Draco

 **Rating:** PG-13

 **Wordcount:** 4300

 **Warnings:** Angst, present tense, violence, minor character death

 **Summary:** Harry has finally found Draco. The chase has been long. And now he stands before the house and uses a spell to understand the man who has eluded him for so long.

 **Author's Notes:** Another of my July Celebration fics, for magicallioness, who prompted: _Harry/Draco of course. Lots of angst and UST. Post-war. Draco is in hiding and Auror!Harry finally finds him after being on his tail for months. But when Harry does find Draco, something makes him decide not to bring him in..._ I'm afraid that I didn't quite get in the UST, but I hope the angst quotient is high enough!

 **Aching, in the Quiet of His Heart**

Harry stands in front of the small, sunken house that he knows contains Draco Malfoy. If he _didn't_ know it, he would have walked right past it. It doesn't look like a house from the outside, but a small ravine, mostly round, with stones tumbled into it.

Long ago, Harry used spells that Aurors aren't supposed to know to link his heartbeat to Malfoy's. So he can look past the unprepossessing façade of the house, the illusions and charms that repel visitors and make it seem as if only animals live in the ravine, and know exactly who's there.

The heartbeat is loud and frantic right now. Malfoy might not know exactly who's there, but he has to suspect someone is.

Harry raises his wand slowly. He always intended to perform this particular spell if he got a chance, but it needs quiet and a few minutes to work, just like the charm that originally linked his heartbeat to Malfoy's, so he certainly couldn't do it in the middle of a battle.

But the forest is so quiet around him. Snow catches fire on the ground. Sunlight sharp as rapiers cuts through the bare trees. This is a forest that Malfoy has been retreating towards for weeks, circling in smaller and smaller rings around it.

It takes Harry a moment before he can murmur the words, and watch the magic that leaves his wand as trailing smoke. It loops about his body for a moment, and then reaches out towards the house. It will pass invisibly through the small cracks in the defensive spells. And there are always cracks. The spell Harry has that lets him hear Malfoy's heartbeat is one such, a conduit that magic can be fed along.

Harry intends to see Malfoy's past, his immediate past and then other scenes beyond it, the picture of each time he committed a crime. The only disadvantage of the spell is its reverse chronological order, which will put the crimes Harry knows more about first.

And maybe then, he will understand why the Aurors wanted him to hunt Malfoy so desperately. _Really_ understand, not listen to the excuses the Ministry has offered up.

* * *

The first image is one of Malfoy in a place Harry doesn't recognize. Harry frowns and shifts himself to the side. The spell lifts memories and places him inside them sort of the way it would in a Pensieve, but this is more like a huge, transparent, shimmering photo. Harry can see colors shining in more than their normal brilliance, and the first thing he really notices is Malfoy's eyes.

Wet and desperate.

Malfoy looks around. He's in a place with huge shelves around him—a shop, Harry realizes after a moment, eyes widening. But it's a Muggle shop. He wonders what Malfoy can possibly have wanted there.

Malfoy drifts down one aisle and then another, eyeing the ceiling. Harry looks up with him, and recognizes Muggle security cameras, and a round mirror near one counter that reflects movement in all sorts of directions.

Why would _Malfoy_ recognize them, though?

Malfoy halts near a shelf that contains cans of soup and mutters something, snapping and twitching his fingers. One of the cans turns into a shimmering blur for a second, and Malfoy snatches it off the shelf and into his pocket. Then he picks up another one and turns with determination towards the front of the shop.

Harry blinks, and blinks again. He _knows_ that spell. It's one that Obliviators use when they need to fool cameras that some big magical event happened in front of. It makes the camera look as if it's malfunctioned for a moment.

But Harry had never expected Malfoy would use it, and especially not wandlessly.

What is going on here?

Harry watches as Malfoy pays for the can of soup visible in his hand with a crumpled note, and then leaves the shop, hunching over. The other can of soup, which he's obviously stolen, sways and bangs into his leg, and Malfoy winces now and then. But his expression never really changes.

 _This isn't the kind of crime I thought he would commit,_ Harry considers in confusion, in the moments before the scene glazes over like a weakened eye and transports him to the next memory.

* * *

The next scene is even more puzzling. Malfoy's sitting in a room made mostly of stone that's probably in the house in front of Harry. He keeps his head bowed, motionless, not even flinching when a series of sharp poundings come from above him. It's probably raining, Harry thinks.

The sound is loud enough, especially with Harry standing right in the middle of the memory, that it takes him a moment to realize Malfoy is talking to himself. Harry moves closer, until he's right next to the crouching Malfoy. It makes things seem even eerier that he has no way to react to Harry.

"…want to fuck you," Malfoy mutters, and rocks back and forth like a crazy homeless Muggle Harry once saw in London. His hands are clenched in his hair. Harry is starting to get the feeling that Malfoy might ignore him even if Harry really _was_ in the same room. "Want to make sure that you know the kind of desire that I feel. The kind of _helpless_ desire."

Harry cocks his head. He wonders what the hell is going on, how this is a crime—

 _Oh. Of course._

The spell has a rather broad interpretation of what's a crime. Malfoy muttering to himself about wanting to fuck someone who doesn't want anyone to do with him would probably count, for the spell, as the crime of rape, because the spell judges based on intentions, more than actions.

Malfoy looks up, and Harry steps back, thinking he will see that Malfoy's been wanking. But his hands are far away from his pants, and his expression of settled despair isn't that much different than the one he wore while robbing the shop, even though it has an edge of lust to it now.

"I don't _want_ to want you," Malfoy says, more clearly than he said the other things. "I hate having to do it, Harry."

Harry's still gaping when the next memory whirls into view.

* * *

This one is even more mysterious than the last was. Malfoy is crouched, shivering, in the shadow of a large rock, while people search for him beyond it.

"You're _sure_ he went this way?"

"Where else would he have gone? Not like he could bloody disappear, is it?"

Harry immediately steps around the rock, rather than wait, this time, for events to happen that will reveal what he wants to know. A large Muggle with a shapeless shirt is staring at an empty place on the ground. To Harry, it looks like it should be occupied by a boulder like the one Malfoy is hiding behind, nothing else.

"I don't know. The way things have been disappearing around here lately…"

"I tell you, Frank," the Muggle man snaps over his shoulder as he straightens up, "this was a _load_ of wood. The wood I was going to use to build _my_ house. And someone made it get up and walk off. Look. No tracks of a truck. No footprints. Not even bloody hoofprints." He scuffs the ground with a boot as Harry watches. "It might as well be magic."

Harry knows, without even looking, that the words will be making Malfoy flinch where he hides. The worst nightmare of people like Malfoy's parents, that someday Muggles will discover the wizarding world.

The Muggle men stomp around and argue a bit more, but they're already walking mostly towards their vehicles, and they seem to have given up on finding the wood. Harry walks back around the boulder to Malfoy, and hears him counting under his breath.

He counts to two hundred after the Muggle men have actually got in their trucks and driven off, and then he gets to his feet and lurches back the way he apparently came. Behind him, halfway there, comes a small floating stack of wood.

Harry blinks. So he did steal it. But what did he want with it?

To build his house, Harry realizes when he comes back. The sheltered cove in the earth looks different without snow around it and glamours disguising it, but that's what it undoubtedly is, a small hovel growing into a real house. More piles of wood sit under Disillusionment Charms here and there. Harry reckons that this must be the point when Malfoy still dared to use his wand, before the Ministry decided to make the hunt for him a priority.

 _But they wouldn't have made it a priority if he was only guilty of stealing from Muggles. What happened, damn it?_

The world blurs into darkness as if in answer.

* * *

Harry drops into the middle of a brawl.

It's almost embarrassing, how quickly he draws his wand and tries to fire Stunners off at people, before he remembers that it's a memory and no one can pause to be astonished or impressed anyway. He clears his throat and falls back, looking around to get a sense of the place.

It's a pub, and from the general noise and lack of robes, Harry surmises, a Muggle one. Most of the men are only spectators, sitting around watching and yelling and laughing. The two men he almost bumped into—well, he _would_ have bumped into if this wasn't a memory—are crowding into a corner, beating someone up with fearsome regularity by now. Their fists and boots rise and fall like machines.

It's Malfoy who crouches in that corner, shivering, not trying to defend himself other than covering his face and stomach and groin.

Harry stares. He moves to the side, but no, he can't see any sign of a wand, even though these memories have to occur in reverse chorological order and Malfoy has to still have one at this point. What's he playing at?

Apparently, the victim. He simply lies there, and the Muggles finally get tired and start to back away. But then another, younger man, with enough resemblance to the tallest attacker to be his son, stands up and laughs and walks closer. He has freckles and shining blue eyes and red hair, but to Harry's relief, any sign that he might look like Ron is diminished by the gleam in his eyes, the sort of sadistic gleam Ron has never had.

 _Though sometimes the twins came close…_

Harry brushes the thought away impatiently, and watches as the boy says something to his father and his father claps him on the back and stands aside. The ginger-haired boy walks up to Malfoy and nudges him with the tip of a boot.

"Hey! Frosty! Look up!"

Malfoy looks up, and his face twists in another expression that steals Harry's breath, although this time because it's not just familiar. It's an expression that Harry's seen before, when he's looked into the mirror while he was caught up in memories of the war and been stolen away by the hatred and horror.

Malfoy unfolds like a spring and hits the boy with a closed fist. Harry can feel the tingle of magic along his nerves. Malfoy is using accidental magic to fuel the blow, and the boy flies across the pub in response and crashes into another wall, knocking him unconscious instantly.

Everyone stares with their mouths open, and in that moment Malfoy wraps his arms around himself and Apparates.

Harry swallows. He recognizes this scene now. Obliviators were called and cleared all the Muggles' memories, including the memory of the boy, who was alive, just stunned. But Malfoy used magic in front of Muggles, and breaking the Statute of Secrecy was added to the long list of his crimes.

As far as Harry can remember, no one ever mentioned exactly _what_ Malfoy had used that magic for. Just that he had.

This time, the swirling colors of the memory that close in and whisk him to the next one are no stronger than the churning of his stomach.

* * *

This particular memory confuses Harry more than any of the rest so far. Malfoy's walking through the middle of a forest, checking over his shoulder every now and then. Where are the Muggles he could harm?

But then Malfoy whirls around to put his back to a tree, and Harry understands. It's not Muggles who are following him.

A slender witch Harry doesn't recognize steps around the corner of the path Malfoy has rounded. There's snow on her hood, thicker than on the ground, and she has blue eyes that shine more brilliantly than the frost. She's looking at Malfoy all the time, stumbling now and then because she's not looking where she's going. Her attention is all for him.

"Go away, Sara." Malfoy's voice is not loud. He has his legs braced in a correct battle position, and Harry remembers, again, that this memory is earlier than the others. Malfoy isn't so wary of defending himself with magic right now.

"Not until you pay for what you did to my parents."

Malfoy gives her an actual snarl, with a mouth so full of teeth Harry wonders for a moment if he contracted lycanthropy and everyone forgot to mention it to Harry. "I didn't do _anything_ to them! It's just that my family survived and they didn't!"

"If you'd been more loyal to the Dark Lord and identified Potter when they brought him to your _home_ , then this would all have been over with. The war would have ended and my parents would have been safe among the Dark Lord's most trusted confidants."

"You're mad."

Malfoy says it with shaky conviction, but Sara only shakes her head. It would be too much to say she's smiling, Harry thinks; he has the impression that nothing joyful could crack the ice of her face. But she does look a bit happier as she moves towards Malfoy, and there's a star of white light on her wand that grows brighter as Harry watches. He doesn't recognize the spell. "Only vengeful. And that's never been called mad in a pure-blood Dark wizard, has it?"

A second later, she pauses and laughs. "Of course, you would hardly _know_ , would you, when you are such a disgrace to both?"

She strikes while she's speaking, and the white star on her wand hisses out and hits Malfoy in the chest. _Malfoy got too distracted by her while she was talking,_ Harry finds himself thinking even as he jumps back in deference to his own battle instincts. _You can never do that, or you end up surrendering to your enemy._

Malfoy shrieks as the white fire burns through his clothes. His hand flies up as if he could smother the flames somehow, but he evidently can't. The fire goes on burning, and Harry can smell the cooking meat and see dark muscle roasting in the center of Malfoy's chest. Sara sniffs the smell as if it's the finest perfume.

"Not long now," she murmurs. "Thank you for standing still and making it easy for me and my parents' spirits to rest at last, Malfoy."

But Malfoy isn't quite beaten yet. He seems to have decided that if he's going to die, he'll make her suffer with him. He holds out his wand and croaks a spell Harry barely recognizes as the Cruciatus Curse, his voice is so harsh when he speaks it.

But Sara goes down in front of it anyway, shaking and screaming. Malfoy, meanwhile, pushes his hand straight into the fire on his chest and does something with wandless magic that Harry can feel but not see. The air ripples around him the way that it does when Dark wizards are playing with that magic.

A second later, the white fire goes out.

Malfoy runs a few steps, and comes to the end of anti-Apparition spells that Harry didn't even feel. Then he vanishes with a crack. The spell on Sara lasts perhaps thirty seconds more, and then she falls back and begins to sob.

Harry swallows slowly. That's another thing Malfoy is wanted by, the use of the Unforgivable Curses.

And of course one should never use them. But Harry can't help thinking how he got away with them during the war.

 _Is it only the war that makes the difference?_ he asks himself as the next memory is relentlessly conjured. _Or is there any other reason that I wasn't arrested and Malfoy was put on the list to be?_

* * *

The next scene is actually in a place that Harry's relatively familiar with. He finds himself in front of a shop, Hathaway's, in Diagon Alley that only opened after the war. It seems to be trying to compete with everyone in a small way. It sells some plain robes, and some jokes, and some food, and some books, and some animals. Harry has gone in there more than once himself, but he doesn't find it as interesting as Hermione seems to. Of course, that's at least partially because Hermione talks about as an example of "wizarding economic initiative," which she seems to think is sorely lacking everywhere else.

Malfoy paces slowly back and forth, as if waiting for someone. But it may only be to gather his own courage, because he finally exhales, takes his wand in hand, and strides over to the shop. He uses a Locking Charm, or so Harry assumes from the way the door sags in its frame. But he doesn't actually know what it is. He follows Malfoy into the shop, and sees him picking his way through the racks and shelves of ordinary items to the biggest shelf at the back, which holds a robe folded around a box. Malfoy picks it up and peeks into the robe.

Harry moves up beside him to see what he's holding. Honestly, it looks like a shrunken trunk. Maybe the shop's lockbox of money. Either way, Malfoy nods and moves towards the front of the shop.

Alarms start to sound so suddenly that even Harry jumps in surprise. Malfoy only freezes for a second before he hurls the box away, though. The alarms follow the box, a voice speaking from it commanding Malfoy to stop and drop his wand.

Malfoy sprints through the shop's front door and up the street, for a moment running right through Harry. There's no shivery uncomfortable sensation about it the way Harry's sometimes experienced with a Pensive memory, but he still ducks and tries to cover his face before he thinks about it. Then he follows Malfoy down the street, shaking his head in the meantime.

Malfoy Apparates with a single wild look around. He's a moment or two ahead of the Hit Wizards who appear, wands at the ready and charms clutched in their hands that will summon an Auror if there's been any Dark magic used to break into the shop.

This time, Harry almost follows Malfoy into the next memory; the colors close in around him like an Apparition. He thinks he's just seen the major reason that Malfoy prefers to steal from Muggles.

* * *

And this time, they come out near Hogwarts.

Harry feels his heart seize. This was the same place that Malfoy committed the first crime; he knows _that_ for sure. But he's no longer sure about the circumstances. He shakes his head to stop Hogwarts from affecting him like it always affects him, and moves to the side, and watches.

Malfoy is on the shore of the lake, staring at the man in front of him. Harry can identify him, although mostly from photographs after what happened rather than memory. This is Amos Diggory, Cedric's father.

And he's staring at Malfoy with an expression pretty similar to the one the witch Sara wore in the other memory.

"You're alive and my son is dead," Amos whispers. "I couldn't believe it when I heard. Everyone said—said you were going to be Kissed. It would be the last casualty of the war as my son was the first. And I thought there was a symmetry to that. But instead you're alive." He shifts his weight a little, cautiously, and his hand comes down as if he's having to restrain his wand like it's a wild beast on a chain. "You _dare_ to be alive."

"I didn't get to choose," Malfoy says, his eyes nervously flitting between Amos's face and his wand. He's a lot younger in this memory, and he hasn't even tried to cast a spell. "I just wanted to live. And the Ministry spared me."

"But not my son."

"I had nothing to do with that!" Malfoy's talking quickly and loudly. "And I even made badges that said everyone should support Cedric because he was the real Hogwarts Champion!"

Amos seems not to have heard. In fact, he's studying Malfoy as though he wants to see how deep a grave he'll have to dig. Then he shakes his head and comes forwards. "You were still on the wrong side. And now you're in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Malfoy never even draws his wand. He just keeps falling back, fearfully, and Amos walks after him as if he'll walk all the way into the Forbidden Forest to kill him.

Harry keeps following, wondering what in the world is going _on_ here. He knows Malfoy killed Amos. The only question is, how?

And then Amos starts to chant a spell Harry recognizes as an agonizing curse, and Malfoy flings his arm over his face and shrieks, and for an instant, everything's complicated, the world flying everywhere, the memory fracturing—

When Harry can see again, he knows Malfoy's used accidental, wandless magic, the kind that responds to someone's deepest desires. It can inflate a Muggle woman speaking badly about your parents and open a locked cupboard and summon your wand.

And it can kill someone threatening you if your deepest desire is to be safe.

That's what's happened. Amos lies with his neck twisted against the root of a huge tree, looking almost exactly like the crumped-up Muggle boy in the pub Harry saw in the earlier—well, really the later—memory. Harry stares, feeling his eyes widen until he's shivering. No _wonder_ Malfoy reacted badly to the sight of that boy. He must have thought he'd killed him the way he killed Amos.

For a moment, the small clearing in the Forbidden Forest is loud with the sound of Malfoy's breathing.

Then he turns and _runs_ , his feet churning the earth to mud.

Harry watches him, and ends the spell.

* * *

When he's aware again, he's standing outside Malfoy's hidden house, and the spell that links his heartbeat to Malfoy's is thrumming wild and strong. Malfoy probably knows someone is here and is figuring how to defend himself.

The problem is that he won't come out without running, and Harry knows what will happen if he does. Another long chase, and Malfoy will steal again to survive, or use accidental magic to defend himself, and everyone at the Ministry will only become _more_ convinced that he's guilty and needs to be hunted down. This time, they might send someone other than Harry to do it, someone who only knows the official stories of Malfoy's crimes and not what the spell let Harry discover.

The context. The nuance.

Harry sighs. He hasn't forgotten the strange memory with Malfoy murmuring his name, either, and he has to admit that's probably part of his determination to give Malfoy a chance. But he doesn't much care about that at the moment. What matters is that he's here. He's seen.

He can't walk away from giving Malfoy that chance.

He lifts the spells that Disillusion him and calls out, "Malfoy? I know you did it on accident. That you did a lot of it to survive, or by accident. And I hope you'll let me speak for you when we go back to the wizarding world, and gradually persuade the Ministry to drop the charges. I'm not planning to turn you in."

Silence. Tense, breathing silence. Except for the heartbeat in his ears, which is shrieking along.

"Come back to the world that should have been yours," Harry says quietly. "Either you do, or you'll keep running further and further into the Muggle world, away from ours, and someday you might do something that will do more than scare you."

He waits. Malfoy breathes and his heart beats.

And then comes the sound Harry has awaited. The sound of the door opening.

Malfoy comes out slowly, one hand raised as if in surrender. The other clutches his wand. He stares at Harry for so long that Harry thinks he'll probably Apparate away, because Harry hasn't bothered to put up spells forbidding Apparition.

Harry holds his gaze mildly, and says nothing at all. He doesn't want Malfoy to feel trapped here, or he _will_ just take off and not let Harry help him, hide him and fight for him. It has to be his choice.

And then Malfoy moves forwards, and Harry relaxes. It feels like a new beginning in all sorts of ways, ways that he can only hope will be good for the both of them.

When Malfoy reaches out and stares at Harry before dropping his wand into his hand, and murmurs, "It _is_ you," Harry's hope transforms into a near certainty.

 **The End.**


End file.
